Publishers Weekly articles from April 1996

Publishers Weekly archives from April 1996

Book sales soar at struggling Musicland; but rapid expansion last year 'strained our operational capabilities.' (Media Play and On Cue stores; Musicland loses $1.35 million in 1995)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... But rapid expansion last year 'strained our operational capabilities' DESPITE FINANCIAL problems and uncertainties surrounding Musicland's future, the company's Media Flay and On Cue outlets sold $106.6 million worth of books in 1995,...

Erik Engstrom is new president of BDD. (Bantam Doubleday Dell restructures operations)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ERIK ENGSTROM, executive mm v-p and COO at Bantam Doubleday Dell, has been named president of the company. He thus takes over one of the titles of chairman and CEO Jack Hoeft, to whom he will continue to report. Announcing Engstrom's...

Profits up, sales down at Hachette. (Hachette Livre financial statistics for 1995)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... LIKE SO MANY of its counterparts around the world, the Hachette Livre group Increased its profitability nicely last year (to the tune of 10%), while watching sales slide (from $865.2 million--with the dollar at five francs--to $837.6 million)....

Rough third quarter for RD. (disappointing third-quarter fiscal year results including a 6% revenue decline and operating losses of $170 million causes Readers Digest's stock to drop $3 on Apr 23, 1996)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... NEWS THAT ITS full-year results will be comparable to, or slightly below, fiscal 1995's (excluding extraordinary charges this year), as well as its settlement in a lawsuit, combined to drive Reader's Digest stock down $3 on April 23. RD had...

HMI is given broader mandate. (Houghton Mifflin Interactive is made a separate operating unit and will work with the educational and trade publishing groups in developing interactive products)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ONLY A FEW MONTHS after releasing its first products, Houghton Mifflin Interactive has been given a new direction by its parent company. HMI, previously part of the trade and reference group, has been made a separate operating unit, and will...

First list due from HarperKids Interactive. (Harper-Collins division will release its new product line of children's interactive products in the fall of 1996)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... THE FIRST FIVE TITLES from HarperCollins Interactive's newest division, HarperKids Interactive, will be released this fall. The product line, which will debut at the E3 show next month, is geared to children aged three to 12 and will look to...

AMS inks deal with Phar-Mor.(Advanced Marketing Services to manage books program for drugstore chain)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ADVANCED MARKETING Services, in a bid to lessen its dependence on warehouse clubs, has signed a multi-year contract with Midwest-based Phar-Mor Inc. to supply and manage the retail drug chain's book program. The company will service...

New BISAC form for accurate sub rights payments.(Book Industry Systems Advisory Committee)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... THE BOOK INDUSTRY Systems Advisory Committee has developed a simple, one-page form to make it easier for publishers to collect payments from subsidiary rights buyers. The Subsidiary Rights Payment Advice Form is being sent to publishers,...

Organa seeks niche as MM broker. (new media company is looking for products with mass market appeal)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... APPROXIMATELY ONE YEAR after its formation, the new media company Organa's first product for the American market has been released. EA. W..S. (Personal Automated Wagging System) is being distributed in this country by Virgin Music, after having...

Random House makes online investment. (publisher makes minority investment in Interactive Imaginations Inc. and enters venture for offering products on the World Wide Web)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... RANDOM HOUSE, WHICH HAS moved aggressively into the CD-ROM field, has made its first online deal through a co-venture with Interactive Imaginations, Inc. The agreement, which includes a significant minority investment in the company, involves...

First Virgin megastore on E. Coast opens. (grand opening of store in New York City's Times Square on Apr 23, 1996)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... THE FIRST VIRGIN MEGASTORE on the East Coast, located in New York City's Times Square, celebrated its grand opening Apr. 23. The 75,000-sq.-ft., three-level store occupies almost the entire block between 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway and...

'95 retail sales revised upward. (revised estimates for total retail book sales in 1995 show 3% increase over 1994)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... LAST YEAR'S RETAIL bookstore sales were not quite as bad as preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau indicated. Newly revised estimates put total retail book sales in 1995 at $10.26 billion, a 3% increase over 1994. Earlier estimates...

Briefly. (short reports on David Wojnarowicz's autobiography, Black Dome publisher, and other developments in the publishing industry)
April 29, 1996... PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Long identified with New York City's Lower East Side gritty art and punk rock demimonde, David Wojnarowicz died in 1992 of AIDS, leaving an expressive legacy of painting, sculpture, installations, autobiographical...

S&S sells Gousha, acquires Mergent, co-ventures with Lycos and China. (Simon & Schuster sold H.M. Gousha to Rand McNally; it also acquired Mergent Technologies, formed Lycos Press and began a publishing venture in China)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... IN A FLURRY of recent activity, Simon & Schuster made a number of divestitures, acquisitions and copublishing arrangements. They included the following: The publishing assets of H.M. Gousha, S&S's cartography unit, which was part of...

EB ends home selling of encyclopedias. (Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop selling door-to-door in the US and Canada; the firm will put more emphasis on online marketing and new product development)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ENDING A DECADES-OLD practice, Encyclopaedia Britannica is eliminating its strategy of selling its print products via in-home selling in the U.S. and Canada, though it will continue to sell door-to-door in other parts of the world. The...

Gale Research, Chicago Library in online partnership. (Gale Research will provide databases to the Chicago Public Library system and help the library convert some of its holdings to digital format)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... GALE RESEARCH has announced a partnership with the Chicago Public Library to provide the library's 80 branches access to Gale's Internet databases. Gale will also provide subscriptions to its CD-ROM databases and assist CPL in converting its...

Widdicombe to head W.H. Freeman.(Elizabeth Widdicombe)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ELIZABETH WIDDICOMBE, formerly vice-president and publisher at Saunders College Publishing, has been named president of W.H. Freeman and Co. She began her publishing career in 1980 as a development editor at Dryden Press, Harcourt Brace's...

Behind the bestsellers.('The Dilbert Principle'; 'Independence Day'; 'God: A Biography')
April 29, 1996... DILBERT GETS HIS REVENGE HarperBusiness is calling Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, "The new management guru of the '90s." His newest book, The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other...

Big deals. (authors Nora Roberts and Jeffery Deaver sign lucrative contracts for, respectively, TV and movie rights to their latest books)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... With her 100th novel Nora Roberts has made it to both the PW and New York Times hardcover bestseller lists, while simultaneously occupying slots on their paperback lists with an earlier book. Further, the hardcover, Montana Sky (Putnam), has...

Starve no more. (eating disorders expert Peggy Claude-Pierre has successfully peddled her book proposal to Times Books for $1 million and to foreign publishers in Europe and Japan)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Peggy Claude-Pierre, mother of two daughters reclaimed from anorexia, runs the Montreaux clinic in British Columbia where she attacks the condition with what is said to be 100% success. Since Beth Vesel of Greenburger Associates sold a proposal...

Daybook. (news about bookstores and the book industry)(Bookselling)
April 29, 1996... FEMINIST BOOKSTORE WEEK STARTS MAY 11 More than 100 feminist bookstores across the U.S. and Canada will celebrate Feminist Bookstore Week from May 11-May 19. The week is designed to draw attention to the contributions of feminist bookstores...

MPBA issues market guide. (Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association publishes travel guide for states in geographic region)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... THE MOUNTAINS & Plains Booksellers Association has released A Guide to the Mountains & Plains Bookselling Market. The 330-page book contains maps of Rocky Mountain and Western Plains areas; demographic information; media information classified...

The numbers game: children's publishers discover that math is a growing niche for trade books.
April 29, 1996... Children's publishers discover that math is a growing niche for trade books THE TRUTH BE TOLD, most kids do not equate math with fun. The mere mention of the word arithmetic can conjure up horrifying visions of homework assignments, tests or...

John Muir revamps extremely weird series. (John Muir Publications reissues new and updated version of its popular 'Extremely Weird Reptiles' series)(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... ITS MULTICOLORED head sprouting three horns, the Jackson's Chameleon is one bizarre looking creature, a fitting fellow indeed for John Muir Publications to feature on the cover of its Extremely Weird Reptiles. This scaly oddity is just one...

Output bounced back in '94. (production of American book titles rose in 1994, but prices remain relatively unchanged)
April 29, 1996... As title production recovered to '89 levels, prices remained stable American book title production has continued to rise in 1994, recording a total of 51,863 titles and exceeding the 50,000 unit mark for the first time since 1989. The final...

Getting the picture - along with the words. (reference materials)
April 29, 1996... Increasingly sophisticated visuals offer many new ways to access information Today's publishers of reference works might well be taking as their motto the time-honored maxim "one picture is worth a thousand words." Certainly, the traditional...

Giving kids' reference a fresh look.(Category Closeup: Reference)(Industry Overview)
April 29, 1996... KIDS GROWING UP IN today's overwhelmingly visual society are likely to spend more time channel-surfing and mouseclicking than turning the pages of a book. The offerings on children's shelves at any bookstore or library in 1996 prove that...

A talk with Michael Korda: Simon & Schuster's presiding spirit discusses his brave, new memoir and the changing book trade. (includes a list of Korda's favorite books he published)(Interview)
April 29, 1996... IN THE AFTERMATH of his two-year battle with prostate cancer, Michael Korda's already eclectic career has taken a surprising twist. As the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster since 1968, he has brought more glamor and visibility to trade...

The Beauty of Men.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Andrew Holleran. Morrow, $25 (400p) ISBN 0-688-04857-9 Lark, the protagonist of Holleran's profoundly sad, elegant and insightful new novel, his first since Nights in Aruba was published 13 years ago, is virtually unique in today's gay...

Mavis.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Brenda K. Marshall Fawcett, $20 (320p) ISBN 0-449-91041-5 Set in North Dakota farmland in 1990, Marshall's generous debut is practically a primer on the effects of birth order in molding character and relationships. Mavis Schmidt Holmstead,...

The Shadow of Desire.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Rebecca Stowe. Pantheon, $22 (240p) ISBN 0-679-42066-5 Four years after her searing first novel, Not the End of the World, Stowe weighs in with a sharp and ultimately moving tale of a family and its buried psychological sins and unaddressed...

Critical Judgment.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Michael Palmer. Bantam, $22.95 (400p) ISBN 0-553-10074-2 A character in Palmer's latest medical chiller (after Silent Treatment) refers to the industrial enclave of Patience, Calif., locked among mountains above San Francisco, as...

White Smoke.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Andrew M. Greeley. Forge, $24.95 (384p) ISBN 0-312-85814-0 A priest's collar adorns Greeley's neck, of course, and the title refers to the smoke issued from the Vatican when a new pope is chosen--but you don't have to be Catholic to enjoy the...

The Frequency of Souls.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Mary Kay Zuravleff Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23 (298p) ISBN 0-374-15851-7 Zuravleff's impressive literary debut is as unassuming as its hero, mild-mannered engineer George Mahoney, whose wife describes him as "a textbook passive-passive." At...

Land Girls.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Angela Huth. St. Martin's, $23.95 (384p) ISBN 0-312-14296-X As WW II rages in the background, three young city women learn about love and themselves on an English farm. High drama and intense meaning, Huth (Invitation to the Married Life)...

Threshold.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Ben Mezrich. HarperCollins, $24 (320p) ISBN 0-06-017302-5 "Do you know what we call a man with a perfect genome?" asks the villain of Mezrich's first novel. "We call that man God" Yes, yet another mad scientist is on the loose, but that...

Batting Against Castro.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Jim Shepard. Knopf, $22 (224p) ISBN 0-679-44668-0 A memorable cast of characters faces various forms of alienation--psychological, political, physical, economic, social in 14 alternately humorous and poignant short stories from novelist...

Streets of Fire.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Soledad Santiago. Dutton, $23.95 (336p) ISBN 0-525-94078-2 Although it brings the people and sensory details of New York's ethnic neighborhoods to bustling life, Santiago's first novel suffers from a cluttered story line. Police officer...

Rowing in Eden.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Barbara Rogan. Simon & Schuster, $22 (304p) ISBN 0-684-81414-5 Cancer-ravaged Louise Pollak dies wordlessly on the first page of Rogan's fifth book, her demise facilitated by her loving husband, Sam. She is nonetheless heard loud and clear to...

Black Light.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Stephen Hunter. Doubleday, $23.95 (448p) ISBN 0-385-48042-3 With a flourish of authorial prestidigitation, through this action-packed tale of revenge Hunter transforms the seemingly unrelated Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys, his most...

The Sweet Everlasting.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Judson Mitcham. Univ. of Georgia, $22.95 (200p) ISBN0-8203-1807-8 "I said I didn't believe in those stories like they have in the movies...I don't think the world fixes itself to suit folks...if you think it does, you're on the road to some...

The Touch.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Julie Myerson. Doubleday/Talese, $21.95 (320p) ISBN 0-385-47507-1 The basic formula of Myerson's second novel (after Sleepwalking) is a familiar one: a mysterious man crashes headfirst into the lives of a London family, disrupting their daily...

Shipwrecks.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Akira Yoshimura, trans. by Mark Ealey. Harcourt Brace, $22 (174p) ISBN 0-15-100194-4 Yoshimura's resonant reconstruction of the poverty-stricken life in a medieval Japanese fishing village is the first of his 20 novels to be translated into...

Go Now.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Richard Hell. Scribner, $18 (176p) ISBN 0-684-82234-2 Drug-addicted punk-rocker Billy Mudd is commissioned in 1980--along with his French photographer girlfriend, Chrissa--to drive across country in a 1957 DeSoto looking for America. Things...

The Prophetess.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Barbara Wood. Little, Brown, $23.45 (400p) ISBN 0-316-81652-3 Feminist spirituality gets its own Celestine Prophecies, and the Vatican gets bashed, in Wood's new novel (after Virgins of Paradise, 1993). In December 1999, archeologist...

The AARP and You.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Charles R. Morris. Times, $23 (256p) ISBN 0-8129-2753-2 This book might more accurately have been tided Old Age Entitlements and You, for vast, important segments deal with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid without reference to the...

Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Daniel Schacter. Basic, $25 (416p) ISBN 0-465-02502-1 Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor, has produced a full, rich picture of how human memory works, an elegant, captivating tour de force that interweaves the latest research in...

Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Roger C. Dunham. Naval Institute, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 1-55750-178-5 For nearly three decades, the U.S. Navy has maintained a tight security net around one of the most successful military operations of the Cold War: the treacherous undersea...

A Beachcombing at Miramar: The Quest for an Authentic Life.
April 29, 1996... Richard Bode. Warner, $15.95 (224p) ISBN 0-446-51867-0 It's a common enough fantasy, moving to a hut on the beach, but Bode, author of the word-of-mouth bestseller First You Have to Row a Little Boat (1993), lives it. In this lyrical memoir,...

War Without Bloodshed: The Art of Politics.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis. Scribner, $25 (400p) ISBN 0-684-80084-5 The authors are Washington insiders: Cliff, contributing editor to Newsweek and a McLaughlin Group weekly TV panelist, and her husband, Brazaitis, Cleveland Plain...

The Huntress: The True Saga of Dottie and Brandi Thorson, Modern Day Bounty Hunters.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Christopher Keane with Dottie Thorson. Fine, $23.95 (288p) ISBN 1-55611-490-7 In the late 1970s, Keane's biography of L.A. bounty hunter Ralph Thorson became a bestseller and was made into a movie starring Steve McQueen called The Hunter. In...

The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... David Rudenstine. Univ. of California, $34.95 (448p) ISBN 0-520-08672-4 On June 13, 1971, the classified study of the Vietnam War conducted by the Defense Department was published in the New York Times and subsequently in the Washington...

Name Dropping: The Life and Lies of Alan King.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Alan King with Chris Chase. Scribner, $23 (224p) ISBN 0-684-80384-4 Though King has filled many shoes during his 50 years in show business--including those of a boxer, a Broadway producer and an actor--he's worn out the most leather as a...

The Body's Edge: Our Cultural Obsession with the Skin.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Marc Lappe. Holt, $22.50 (256p) ISBN 0-8050-4208-3 Unlike ancient cultures that prized the wrinkled faces of the elderly, we worship supermodels' smooth, expressionless skin and spend billions on cosmetics to achieve a youthful look. The...

Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts 1475-1550.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Maurits Smeyers and Jan Van der Stock. Abrams, $60 (244p) ISBN 0-8109-6318-3 Threatened by advances in book printing, Flemish miniaturists around 1500 responded by making their illustrations of handwritten codices ever more inventive,...

Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Hazel Henderson. Berrett-Koehler, $29.95 (380p) ISBN 1-881052-90-7 In place of what she calls today's global economic warfare, based on cutthroat capitalism, expansionist nationalism, planned obsolescence and overconsumption, economist and...

Residents: The Perils and Promise of Educating Young Doctors.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... David Ewing Duncan. Scribner, $23 (304p) ISBN 0-684-19709-X Duncan spent four years observing, and sometimes living among, residents in more than a dozen U.S. hospitals. He saw dosages mixed up, drugs given that shouldn't have been,...

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Mark Royden Winchell. Univ. Press of Virginia, $45 (608p) ISBN 0-8139-1647-X Readers over age 40 may recall the New Criticism from college English. To over-simplify, New Criticism was a modernist approach that viewed and interpreted a work...

New Moon.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Richard Grossinger. North Atlantic Books/Frog (PGW, dist.), $25 (600p) ISBN 1-883319-44-7 The grandson of famed Catskill resort owner Jennie Grossinger, the author (Planet Medicine) grew up in a Manhattan apartment with his mother,...

Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Robert A. Weinberg. Harmony, $27.50 (288p) ISBN 0-517-59118-9 The realization that viruses cause certain types of cancer, resulting from research conducted from the mid-1970s to the mid-'80s, is the focus of oncologist Weinberg's complex,...

Sailing on the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Lawrence Suid. Naval Institute, $45 (352p) ISBN 1-55750-787-2 Hollywood and the U.S. Navy, judging from this thorough but lackluster study, have been scratching each other's backs for a long time. According to Suid (Guts and Glory: Great...

In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: A Geography of Grief.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Christopher Noel. Times Books, $23 (224p) ISBN 0-8129-2679-X In 1992, Noel's fiancee, Brigid, in her late 20s, was killed in an automobile accident in Vermont. In this memoir the author, who heads the writing program at the University of...

When I Think About My Father: Sons and Daughters Remember.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Edited by Mary Kay Shanley. Sta-Kris, Inc. (EO. Box 1131, Marshalltown, Iowa 50138), $14.95 (52p) ISBN 1-882835-35-2 In 48 personal essays, illustrated with family snapshots and other memorabilia, the significance of fathers to their...

Latino Success: Insights from America's Most Powerful Latino Business Executives.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Augusto A. Failde and William S. Doyle. Simon & Schuster, $22 ISBN 0-684-81312-2 Failde, a developer of Latino media, writing with freelancer Doyle, contends that the entrepreneurship of the nation's Hispanic population goes largely...

My Father's War: A Son's Journey.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Peter Richmond. Simon & Schuster, $23 (288p) ISBN 0-684-80040-3 This intensely personal account of three WWII battles in the Pacific as reconstructed by the son of a Marine captain who fought in them is less about war than about a boy's...

Searching for the Promised Land: An African-American's Optimistic Odyssey.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Gary Franks. ReganBooks, $23 (240p) ISBN 0-06-039156-1 This relatively short book combines a memoir with policy arguments by Franks, the Connecticut Republican who in 1990 became Congress's first black conservative. Franks's unpretentious...

Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... William Irwin Thompson. St. Martin's, $24.95 (284p) ISBN 0-312-15834-3 In these wide-ranging, deep essays, cultural critic and philosopher Thompson (At the Edge of History) continues his investigation of what he perceives to be an emerging...

The Corps and the Shore.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Orrin H. Pilkey and Katherine L. Dixon. Island Press, $22.95 (282p) ISBN 1-55963-438-3 The future of our shoreline, say the authors, is not in the hands of a natural resource agency but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They believe coastal...

Principal Suspect: The True Story of Dr. Jay Smith and the Reinert Murder Case.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... William Costopoulos. Camino, $22 (304p) ISBN 0-940159-36-8 Smith had been the principal of the high school in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Merion for 12 years when, in 1979, he was arrested and found guilty of two robberies. Searching his...

Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career of Detective David Durk.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... James Lardner. Random, $25 (392p) ISBN 0-394-57648-9 David Durk, an Amherst graduate who had also spent a year studying law, joined the New York City Police Department in 1963. He was shocked and angered by what he found there: officers who...

At Fenway: Dispatches from Red Sox Nation.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Dan Shaughnessy. Crown, $24 (256p) ISBN 0-517-70104-9 Shaughnessy's (One Strike Away) memoir about the Boston Red Sox and their home field, Fenway Park, is baseball from the heart. Throughout the book there are reminiscences about Fenway;...

Dignity.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Jean-Bertrand Aristide, trans. with an afterword by Carrol F. Coates, introduction by Christophe Wargny. Univ. Press of Virginia, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 0-8139-1674-7 This isn't really a narrative of Aristide's life following the September 1991...

A Voice of Our Own: Leading American Women Celebrate the Right to Vote.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Edited by Nancy M. Newman. Jossey-Bass, S22 (304p) ISBN 0-7879-0231-4 Commissioned by the League of Women Voters to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, this collection of 28 essays by prominent American women assesses both...

When the Land Was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Sharman Apt Russell. Addison-Wesley, $23 (224p) ISBN 0-201-40698-5 At one time, American archeologists were insensitive, racist and sexist, says the author. Only after WWII did the), begin to explore social behavior, settlement patterns and...

Thinking in the Future Tense: Leadership Skills for a New Age.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Jennifer James. Simon & Schuster, $22 (256p) ISBN 0-684-810984) James focuses on qualities she says contribute to better leadership, such as perspective, cultural knowledge and valuing diversity. A Washington urban cultural anthropologist,...

Television's Second Golden Age: From 'Hill Street Blues' to 'ER.'(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Robert J. Thompson. Continuum, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 0-8264-0901-6 Thompson (coauthor of Prime Time, Prime Movers) argues that TV's so-called Golden Age of the 1950s does not equal television of the '80s and early '90s. He gives a short history...

The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1996 and the Search for Peace.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Tim Pat Coogan. Roberts Rinehart, $29.95 (500p) ISBN 1-57098-092 6 Coogan, biographer of Michael Collins and Eamon DeValera who has written the definitive history The IRA, here tackles the "troubles" that have plagued Ulster since 1966. After...

A Cast of Friends.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Bill Hanna with Tom Ito, foreword by Joe Barbera. Taylor, $22.95 ISBN 0-87833-916-7 Hanna was born in New Mexico in 1910 and as a child moved to Southern California. During the Depression, when he was forced to drop out of college and look...

Honus Wagner: A Biography.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Dennis DeValeria and Jeanne Burke DeValeria. Holt, $27.50 (320p) ISBN 0-8050-3750-0 Baseball's legendary "Flying Dutchman" was born in Pennsylvania in 1874, the son of immigrant German parents. He was signed to play in the minor leagues and...

The Nemesis File.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Paul Bruce. Blake (Seven Hills, dist.), $22.95 (300p) ISBN 1-85782-135-1 This British import alleges that the SAS, an elite unit of the British army, wantonly executed Catholic men in Belfast during the early 1970s. British soldier Bruce (a...

The Old Life.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, $19.95 (134p) ISBN 0-395-78841-2 This collection has little of the sharply observed, tender lyricism that characterizes much of Hall's earlier work, yet the four sequences here reflect preoccupations that he has...

The Lord and the General Din of the World.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Jane Mead. Sarabande (Consortium, dist.), $12.95 (96p) ISBN 0-9641151-1-5; cloth $19.95 -0-7 The confessional, lyric poems in Mead's stark, commanding first collection were selected by Philip Levine for the 1995 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in...

Strange Relation.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Daniel Hall. Penguin, $13.95 (88p) ISBN 0-14-058771-3 Hall's first book, Hermit with Landscape, was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; and this, his second book, is a winner of the 1995 National Poetry Series (selected by Mark...

The Crack in Everything.(Brief Article)
April 29, 1996... Alicia Ostriker. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $10.95 (80p) ISBN 0-8229-5593-8; cloth $24.95 -3936-3 Ostriker has long been admired as both a feminist literary critic and a poet. The accomplished poems in her expansive eighth collection are grounded...